Evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks decries “tribal thinking” and advocates “listen[ing] to other arguments” — except when it comes to people who disagree with him on evolution. He writes at The Conversation:

Today, in the challenge-free spaces and echo-chambers of our social media feeds, we are arguably becoming ever more vulnerable to tribal convictions. Almost half of us now get all our news from Facebook, for example; information that is digitally targeted to align with our interests. As a consequence, that “information” reflects, and so reinforces, our biases far more than it informs.

In this atmosphere, it takes a special kind of intellectual honesty to interrogate our own ideas as rigorously as we do other people’s, to listen to other arguments, and to discard our own bad ideas. But this is the only way to break the self-reinforcing binds between tribal identity and conviction. [Emphasis added.]

Yet in the very next paragraph he goes on:

My own research field, the evolution of sexual behaviour, fights not one but two long-running tribal conflicts. Creationism still represents the textbook example of tribal conviction trumping honest understanding. Darwinian natural selection confronts the Creationist urge to see humanity as a special part of a grand plan that divinely orders the living world.

However, any student of natural history understands that adaptation is neither grand nor planned, and that imperfect patterns emerge from the bottom-up as individuals strive to maximise their own fitness at the expense of others.

Any “student of natural history” understands this provided that he never strays from his own “echo-chamber” and thus hasn’t been exposed to the “other arguments” that Brooks classifies as “creationism.” By that scare word, he evidently means any notion that unguided natural processes alone may not fully account for the marvels of biology.

A little further down, Brooks writes:

Evolutionary biologists have long known not to debate creationists; their calls for debate amount to cynical time-wasting.

So the “special kind of intellectual honesty to interrogate our own ideas as rigorously as we do other people’s, to listen to other arguments” stops cold when it comes to skeptics in his own field. Protein chemist Douglas Axe of Biologic Institute, author of Undeniable, tweets skeptically in reply to Brooks:

4. That sounds like tribalism to me @Brooks_Rob.

— Douglas Axe (@DougAxe) November 29, 2016

Or like a scientist who hasn’t thought through the implications of his own commendable ideas. Rob Brooks, may we have the pleasure of introducing you to Rob Brooks?

Photo: Golden eagle, by Diego Delso [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons/.

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